Is There Room In The Market For A Standalone High-Fidelity Music Player?

Neil-Young-PonoMusic-Pono-Portable-Music-Player

Neil Young hates MP3s. He’s right to do so, to be honest. MP3s made sense in 2001 when broadband adoption was nowhere near what it is today, and where hard drives were a lot more expensive. But in 2014, there’s no real reason to degrade music to the point that the MP3 algorithm does. So that’s where Neil Young’s PonoPlayer comes in. Aside from handling traditional 256kbps iTunes store style files, the player chews up the following:

    CD lossless quality recordings: 1411 kbps (44.1 kHz/16 bit) FLAC files
    High-resolution recordings: 2304 kbps (48 kHz/24 bit) FLAC files
    Higher-resolution recordings: 4608 kbps (96 kHz/24 bit) FLAC files
    Ultra-high resolution recordings: 9216 kbps (192 kHz/24 bit) FLAC files

You’ll also have access to the PonoMusic store, where you can actually find (and buy) these high quality files. To put things in perspective, the “CD Lossless” quality file still contains about 30 times more data than a typical MP3. If you’re going to pay for music (and really, you probably should), you may as well pay for all the music the artist intended.

It’s $300 for the player, and an extra $100 will give you a version autographed by artists like “Patti Smith, Tom Petty, Beck, Arcade Fire, Dave Matthews Band, The Foo Fighters and others.” Granted it’s a lot of money for functionality that your iPhone technically already possesses. But if you really see it this way, then this product definitely isn’t for you.

[ Project Page ] VIA [ WalYou ]

The post Is There Room In The Market For A Standalone High-Fidelity Music Player? appeared first on OhGizmo!.

Xbox One is DLNA Compatible


Microsoft's Xbox One takes an edge on Sony's PS4 just few days ahead of launch. Sony has announced last week that PS4 will not have DLNA support. Hence PS4 cannot work as home multi-media streaming...

Turn Your MP3 Files Into A Low-Fi Vinyl

Now that we live in a digital age, there’s been a concerted effort to back up old analog media in a, well, digital format. You’ve no doubt seen machines whose job it is to turn tapes and even vinyls into MP3′s or even higher quality lossless formats. But now that 3D printing is coming of age, a project by Amanda Ghassaei seeks to turn those MP3s right back into the vinyls they might have once come from. As you can imagine, the result is very low quality. Not only is the MP3 format lossy, meaning it removes some detail from the music in order to compress it into a small size, but the resolution limits on modern 3D printing techniques further adds a layer of noise to the original sound. But still, you’re left with a record that can be played in a standard turntable, and which was produced with a 3D printer.

I’ve created a technique for converting digital audio files into 3D-printable, 33rpm records and printed a few prototypes that play on ordinary turntables. Though the audio quality is low -the records have a sampling rate of 11kHz (a quarter of typical mp3 audio) and 5-6 bit resolution (less than one thousandth of typical 16 bit resolution)- the audio output is still easily recognizable. These records were printed on an Objet Connex500 resin printer to a precision of 600dpi with 16 micron z axis resolution. The 3D modeling in this project was far too complex for traditional drafting-style CAD techniques, so I wrote an program to do this conversion automatically.

Check out Amanda’s site for a bunch more details on what she did, after the jump. Also, a few renderings of the grooves that are produced, as well as a video with a sample of the sound produced.

[ Amanda Ghassaei ] VIA [ Gizmag ]